Technologically Mediated Identity

Executive Summary This submission outlines key findings around sexualisation, gender, sexuality and body image drawn from international research and over a decade of international research and from the investigators own projects. The methodologies informing these projects are sociological including qualitative focus groups, interviews and online observations, which places young people's voices and communications at the centre of the research. These methods offer often neglected in-depth, first hand and contextually rich experiences of how young people understand and navigate appearance norms and body image issues both online and in and around schools.

The theory of technological mediation aims to take technological artifacts seriously, recognizing the constitutive role they play in how we experience the world, act in it, and how we are constituted as (moral) subjects. Its quest for a compatible ethics has led it to Foucault’s “care of the self,” i.e., a transformation of the self by oneself through self-discipline. In this regard, technologies have been interpreted as power structures to which one can relate through Foucaultian “technologies of the self” or ascetic practices. However, this leaves unexplored how concrete technologies can actually support the process of self-care. This paper explores this possibility by examining one such technology: a gamified To-Do list app. Doing so, it first shows that despite the apparent straightforwardness of gamification, confrontation and shame play an important role in how the app motivates me to do better. Second, inspired by Ihde’s schema of human-technology relations, it presents diffe...